thanks to the efforts of the diehard Archimedes community and their "We Hate You" stance on simple, easy emulation procedures.

I was willing to try out two new Archimedes emulators called Arculator and RPCEmu, and realised I needed to find the appropriate BIOS rom images first. Now while Google tends to locate most other general BIOSes a lot easier, Acorn ones seem to be like the Holy Grail. I absolutely cannot for the life of me find them. No torrent sites have them. P2P can't help me. And none of the rom collection burners even support Archimedes stuff full stop, it appears. And it seems that the Acorn zealots are even more deluded about the machine's commercial status than the Amiga ones. Seriously.

They'll most likely redirect you to a product called Virtual Acorn - £79 minimum to emulate an Acorn on your Windows, with no clear indication as to what emulator will be used, or what BIOS images will be included, if they're not bloody encrypted or shit like that. I mean come on, Amiga Forever costs only half that roughly!

Anyways, after a good deal of patience, I managed to acquire a version of Virtual Acorn through BitTorrent. But it only includes RISC OS 4.0, which - surprise, surprise ladies and gentlemen - isn't supported by either of the emulators.

Why, why, just why the fuck bother to bring out good and interesting emulators if their authors and the rest of the community make it absolutely, hideously, bloody difficult to find the necessary BIOS files required to give them a whirl? Kickstart hunts were never this bad in comparison I tell ya! (And for the record I'm not stuck in the slightest on any Amiga-related emulation issues, cheers.)